The Asylum Seeker

For a chance at a better life, it helps to make your bad story worse.

Atrocity stories get inflated, as applicants compete with the lore of other applicants.

Illustration by BARRY BLITT

I met Caroline one Friday evening in the cafeteria of the upscale Manhattan supermarket where she had just started working. She was a twenty-something African immigrant without papers; we’d recently been introduced by a mutual acquaintance. “Hi, Carol—” I stopped myself, seeing the look on her face.

Caroline was living three lives: as Cecile Diop, a woman with papers who had been in the country for ten years; as Caroline the African rape and torture victim; and as herself, a middle-class young woman who wanted to go to college and make a life in America. It was a continuous exercise in willed schizophrenia. (Names and other identifying details have been changed throughout.)

I tried again: “Hi, Cecile!”

Cecile Diop, a fellow-expat from central Africa, had lent Caroline her Social Security number so that she could get the job. Caroline had showed the store manager Cecile’s I.D., but he couldn’t tell the difference between the two women. She was expecting her first paycheck, which she would give to Cecile to cash. “Some of them take half,” Caroline said, about such arrangements between immigrants.

“I cannot get fired,” she explained. “The owner of the name will have trouble.”

Caroline had big eyes, an easy smile, and short hair dyed red-blond. She was dressed in a denim jacket and jeans and a tight sweater. She walked me around the two floors of the giant supermarket, pointing out all the places where samples were given out. She urged me to take some dried fruit. I pierced a dried-banana slice with a toothpick; it was nearly inedible. Caroline didn’t believe in all this organic and natural stuff. “People in the United States are a little . . .” She pointed a finger at her head and turned it in circles.

At the supermarket, she made ten dollars an hour. After Social Security and medical deductions—which were of no value to Caroline, only to Cecile—she didn’t have enough money to eat at the store, even with the twenty-per-cent employee discount. “I can never eat the hot food,” she said. It cost $7.99 a pound. So, surrounded by food of every description from every country, Caroline brought lunch from home.

As we left the store, Caroline, as an employee, had to submit her bag to a guard for an inspection. “Do you want me to take things out?” she asked. “I can see the bottom,” the guard responded, and waved her on. Another guard, a white woman, trying to soften the humiliation of the inspection, made small talk: “I’ve been looking all over for that kind of handbag for my daughter. Where did you get it? Herald Square?”

Caroline had come to the United States the previous summer for a family wedding. When her parents left, she stayed, even after her tourist visa expired.

Now she was working on a story—a four-page document, in French, that she would give to a lawyer she had hired, and to immigration officials—saying that she was beaten and raped more than once by government soldiers in her country. “I have never been raped,” she admitted, giggling with embarrassment.

A clerk in Caroline’s lawyer’s office had suggested, “Why don’t you say you were circumcised?” Caroline told her that female circumcision wasn’t practiced in her country. So she had learned how to play a rape victim. She had pangs about lying: “Telling that story makes me sad, because I know it’s true for someone.”

A friend of mine, a former lawyer who has represented people in asylum cases, had recently told me about the difficulty of making a persuasive asylum plea these days. “The immigration people know the stories. There’s one for each country. There’s the Colombian rape story—they all say they were raped by the FARC. There’s the Rwandan rape story, the Tibetan refugee story. The details for each are the same.”

It is not enough for asylum applicants to say that they were threatened, or even beaten. They have to furnish horror stories. It’s not enough to say that they were raped. The officials require details. Inevitably, these atrocity stories are inflated, as new applicants for asylum get more inventive about what was done to them, competing with the lore that has already been established, with applicants whose stories, both real and fake, are so much more dramatic, whose plight is so much more perilous, than theirs.

We went to a Brazilian restaurant nearby for a drink and supper. Caroline ordered a coconut cocktail and a salad with chicken.

“I got my paycheck. Want to see it?” She pulled it out of her bag. She’d worked 64.42 hours in the past couple of weeks, at ten dollars an hour. After deductions, she was left with a total of $521.69 to give to “the owner of the name.” She was hoping that the real Cecile wouldn’t take too big a cut; maybe she wouldn’t take any cut at all, even though she was only an acquaintance.

I asked Caroline how, with a thousand dollars a month, she was going to pay the rent, four hundred and fifty dollars a month, for her one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx; cover food and transportation; and pay her lawyer, who was charging three thousand dollars. It turned out that Caroline’s family had to put money in a credit-card account she has back in Africa. And she had been through worse times. For a week, when she was living in a friend’s apartment, she had no money for food. She found some rice in the kitchen, and ate it with the only available condiment—sugar. When December came, she had no winter clothes—only a thin jacket. “We don’t have winter,” she said of the climate in central Africa. One of the teachers at the New York Public Library, where she went for English classes, saw her shivering, and gave her one of her old coats. “It’s funny,” Caroline said, and laughed, thinking about those times.

Caroline’s parents are supporters of a controversial opposition leader. Government soldiers ransacked their house in the city twice. Caroline remembered the soldiers as being very stupid, and from the countryside. Although they didn’t rape her or her sisters, once they broke a dish over one sister’s head, and they beat her brother. They were looking for her father. One of her sisters, as she was running from the soldiers, felt a sharp stab in her foot; she had stepped on a nail. She kept running, with the nail stuck in her foot.

One night, Caroline was walking home on a deserted street when a group of five soldiers commanded her to stop. They searched her bag, and found some condoms. “You carry condoms?” they asked. They emptied the contents on the ground, and stole everything she had—her phone, her watch, her earrings, her money. But they let her go.

She had reason to be fearful. Since 1998, millions have died and millions more have been displaced as a consequence of a tangle of regional wars that have roiled central Africa. And in many regions rape has become common. Caroline spoke about why there is so much violence there: “The ministers who are arresting people today—yesterday, you were arresting them.” Now Caroline wants to live in America, where it’s easier to make money, and easier to live as a woman. She recently had won a prize in a drawing at the supermarket: the right to make up her own schedule for the following week. “I can work more hours!” she told me excitedly.

One day, I met Caroline at the entrance to a public hospital, a place where people aren’t denied treatment because they can’t pay. There was a large red banner celebrating “uninsured week.” It seemed a relatively orderly madhouse.

To buttress her asylum claim, Caroline needed a letter from the hospital stating that she had been treated for torture. For months, she had been attending group and individual psychotherapy sessions, as part of a program for survivors of torture. Today, she was here for a gynecological exam, which is required for rape victims. She showed me her appointment slip, which read “Victim of torture.”

Caroline had to come twice a week, for the therapy sessions, and sometimes more often—this week, it was the gynecological exam and an H.I.V. test. But in the elevator she said she couldn’t remember the floor where the center for torture survivors was. “When I was a child, I fell and hurt my head,” she said. “So I can’t remember many things. I show the scar and say it happened because of torture.”

In the group-therapy sessions, Caroline didn’t volunteer much. Sometimes the stories she heard were hard for her to listen to. She also has individual sessions with a psychiatrist, who prescribes antidepressants: Zoloft, Wellbutrin, trazodone. “She gives me medicine, to make me sleep, to make me calm. I throw it away.” How did she know what to tell the doctor? She laughed when I asked her this. She read the symptoms described on the drug inserts—dizziness, sleeping too much or too little, and so forth—and repeated them to the psychiatrist.

She had had the H.I.V*.* test the previous day. Doctors asked her about the last time she’d had sex, and who it was with. “I don’t know his name!” Caroline had cried. “I was raped!”

She recalled, “There was such compassion on their faces.”

She came out of the gynecological examination holding a wad of paper: “They gave me tissue.” She’d started crying when the doctor told her, “Remove your panties.” Seeing her break down, the doctor was almost crying, too. Caroline said, “I don’t feel good about it—lying to people.” The physical exam, though, had been postponed.

Caroline knew people who really had been raped; she had heard their stories. But she believed that she was far from being the only asylum seeker at the torture survivors’ center who was lying or exaggerating. “Everybody’s story is a mixture of what is true and what is not,” she said. Caroline had been tutored in how to act like a rape victim by her landlady in the Bronx, who hadn’t been raped, either, but had successfully applied for asylum. And Caroline was also getting help in crafting her narrative from a Rwandan man I’ll call Laurent, who was a sort of asylum-story shaper among central Africans.

Some months later, on a warm summer evening, I met Laurent at the Senegalese restaurant Patisserie des Ambassades. We waited at an outside table for Caroline to join us.

Laurent was handsome and well mannered, and looked younger than his forty-odd years. He was a man of enormous self-confidence. His mother was Tutsi and his father Hutu; he grew up in Burundi and went to university there, before moving to Rwanda and then to France, where he worked as the manager of an arts troupe. He had relatives who were murdered, and relatives who murdered.

He talked about what had happened to his country. He knew of a man, he said, who had killed his best friend. Afterward, the man was haunted by the thought that he hadn’t buried the body. Since he couldn’t carry the whole body, he cut off his friend’s head and set off toward the cemetery with it. On the way, he was arrested and thrown into prison, with his friend’s head for company. “He doesn’t take showers,” Laurent said.

Laurent had come to America when he was in his thirties. As soon as he arrived at J.F.K. Airport, he started figuring out the ways of America. The first immigration agent he saw asked him where he was going to stay in America. Laurent shrugged. He said he had a phone number for a cousin, and was going to call him when he got out of the airport. The agent asked him to wait in a holding room for further questioning. He sat there with a ragged horde of people from all over the world. He thought that he would be sent back. Then a black immigration agent noticed him, and said, “Hey, brother, go to that agent over there.” The second agent stamped his passport and let him in, showing Laurent that it isn’t just in Africa that tribe is important.

Now he taught French in public schools. He found the standards very low. “A C student from Rwanda will automatically be an A student here,” he said.

When Caroline arrived, she kissed Laurent on both cheeks.

“I will never make appointments with Africans,” he said. “They keep saying, ‘Oh, this is African time.’ ” He gestured toward his watch. “Three hours late!”

Caroline had just moved into a new apartment, in Rockaway, and she’d had to go to her apartment from her job, before coming back here. It took her more than an hour each way, by bus and subway, to get to work. What did she do on the commute? Read? Listen to music?

She shut her eyes, and her head drooped. “Sleep.”

“You need to be closer to work,” Laurent said. “Once you become Caroline, you can move.”

But right now she was looking fresh; the evening was beginning to cool, and she was hungry. She ordered a large platter of tilapia and plantains.

Talking about her new apartment, she said, “I have one big problem: cockroaches. I have some in my bag sometime.” She held up her purse. “But they are small.”

She’d been working hard. The other day, she’d stood for sixteen hours straight, working a double shift. She’d been sneezing, and felt cramps. But she was scared of getting sick. “If something happens to me at work—I’m not me, I’m Cecile. Can you imagine if they call an ambulance?”

Laurent knew several other people who lived or worked under different names. A Kenyan, for instance, had invited Laurent home for dinner, with the people he was staying with. When Laurent called him by his name, he felt his leg being kicked hard under the table. “I know many Africans who come here and don’t have any dreams,” Laurent said. “They stay in jobs—grocery stores, delivery, selling illegal DVDs, street venders. For girls, it’s hair braiding.”

Advising Caroline about her asylum narrative, Laurent said, “When you make up a story, make it yours. No one knows your story better than you.” He has helped three people with their stories; two of them were successful in getting asylum.

“To tell you the truth, even my story was made up,” he said. He didn’t apply for asylum as a Rwandan refugee, because “I didn’t want to compromise my family in Rwanda.” So his story was about Burundi. “I know the politics of Burundi, and so I could make it up,” he said. At the asylum hearing, the officer asked him specific questions about the geography of his narrative: “Where was the police station? Where was the swimming pool?” The officer kept referring to geographical data that she had obtained from the C.I.A., but Laurent’s information was more recent, and he told her so. She checked, and found that it was true.

His story was that his house in Burundi was attacked, and he ran away, and, when he went back to look, the house had been bombed. The officer checked the news from the day he was referring to, and, indeed, a house in that part of that city had been bombed. Laurent had read the newspaper report as he was constructing his story: “I made that story mine.”

The officer asked him what he would do if she let him stay in the country, and he told her that he was planning to go back to school. This pleased her; evidently, most of the applicants she saw talked about getting jobs. But Laurent knows how to play the African intellectual. He was granted asylum.

“When I got the news that I got the immigration, I was shaking,” he said. “I wanted to call my cousin, but I even forgot his number.” He had crossed a line between illegal and legal, between being deported and freedom. “Now it’s up to me,” he added. “Before, it was up to them.”

One day, Caroline’s lawyer received a letter, saying that a hearing on her application had been scheduled at the asylum office. I offered to go with her, and, at her request, I enlisted a French friend, Marie, to act as her translator. Caroline felt more comfortable making her case in French.

The asylum office was outside the city, in an office block that could have been in any suburb in the country. We took the elevator up to the office and signed in at security. Above the security guard’s monitor was a printout that read:

I can only please one person per day

Today is not your day

Tomorrow is not looking good either.

The guard took out Caroline’s camera, which was in a brown bag inside her purse. “You can’t bring this in here.”

“Can we check it?”

“We don’t check nothing. You got to find a hiding place for it. Like behind a door.”

“What if we take out the battery?”

“You can break it in half, and you still can’t bring it in here. You got to find a hiding place.”

I hid the camera behind a door, hoping that it would still be there when we came out.

The waiting room was filled with black-and-white posters of African and Latin-American refugees. The signs were a forest of “no”s: No Cell Phones, No Eating, No Drinking, No Cameras, No Chewing Gum. I tried the water fountain; it emitted hot, undrinkable water, like a soup.

Caroline reviewed the dates in her testimony, like a student preparing for the biggest exam of her life. She flubbed one of the dates. Her lawyer hadn’t shown up, and she was anxious. “I don’t know why I go through it,” she said. “I don’t know why I didn’t just go back. They are racists and xenophobes here.”

From other asylum applicants, Caroline had been told to beware of an immigration officer, a man I’ll call Novick, who said no to everybody. She hoped she didn’t get Novick.

A paralegal from Caroline’s lawyer’s office appeared, breathless, and apologized for being late. Her name was Mrs. Patel, and she waited along with us. Occasionally, the door to the officers’ section opened; the officers who appeared were white men and an Asian woman. When they called out a name, two or three people from the waiting area disappeared inside with them.

Finally, Caroline’s name was called out, by a rumpled, middle-aged white officer who stood holding the door open. It was Novick.

We walked down a corridor, past a series of generic, glassed-in offices—one of which had a cover from the Cuban Communist organ Granma pasted on its window—into Novick’s office. It was bare yet dishevelled, and contained a few files and a pocket atlas lying on the floor. There were no family pictures, and the window blinds were drawn, though through them I could make out a flock of pigeons roosting in a tree. We took our seats, and the interview began.

Novick made a phone call, asking for a government translator, who could monitor Marie’s translation, via speakerphone, to make sure that it was accurate.

He turned to Caroline. “Why are you seeking asylum?”

Caroline addressed her responses to Marie: “I am afraid to go back and endure what I have already endured in my country.”

“How were you mistreated?”

“I was arrested, beaten, and raped.”

“Tell me the details. Why it happened, when.”

“The President of my country was about to be overthrown. My father worked with the previous government. They arrested my father, and tortured everybody at home.”

“Please provide the details,” Novick said. “How were they tortured?”

“They attacked my brother,” Caroline said, a tear welling up.

“I’m sorry,” Novick said. “How?”

“They shot my brother in the leg.” The tears were flowing now, and she asked Novick if he had any tissues. She searched in her handbag. “I used to have it here but . . .” She dug out some tissues she had taken from the bathroom.

“They asked for my father,” she continued, wiping her eyes. “My mother and father walked in the door as my brother was being attacked.” She went into the logistics of the attack. “They undressed me and one of my sisters and raped us.”

“What about the other sister?” Novick asked.

“They were beating her but not raping her.”

“O.K., so what else happened?” Novick was reading the written statement she had submitted earlier, and taking notes.

After the rape, she said, she had to have an abortion.

“Is there any documentary evidence of this abortion?”

“Of course not!”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“I don’t want any documentary evidence of this abortion because it happened as a result of a rape.”

He wanted more details of the rape. Caroline provided them. She also recounted how soldiers arrested her and some other students, and took them to a detention center. “They took me by the head and they put my head against their penis. They spat on us.” As she was saying this, her eyes were almost closed. “They wanted us to do things.”

“What things?” He wanted specifics. “You were beaten how many times, approximately?”

She said she had had to go to the hospital; he asked her for the evidence. She said it was back in Africa.

“How long will it take for you to get it?”

“I don’t know . . . because of all the riots and the pillages.” She continued with her story. “They arrested us during one of our meetings and took us to a prison. They beat us up and did horrible things to us.”

“Please describe.”

“They forced us to do fellatio and they put objects in our genitals. They stamped on us, they trampled us for three days. I suffered many infections because of the rape. My kidneys got infected.”

“Did you go to the hospital? Do you have evidence?”

“There is evidence, but I don’t have it with me.”

Novick was almost finished. “Anything else you want to say?”

“People are not allowed to express their opinion if they’re against power,” Caroline said of her country.

“What will happen if you return?”

“I might be killed on the road, because I am a member of the opposition.”

“Why did you stay all these years?”

“I didn’t have the opportunity to leave.”

“Why not?”

“I hadn’t been invited before. The threats and arrests had intensified.”

On the way out, I noticed a stack of brown files outside another officer’s door. On one of them was a sheet of paper that said, in large black letters:

CONGRESSIONAL INTEREST!

CONGRESSIONAL INTEREST!

CONGRESSIONAL INTEREST!

CONGRESSIONAL INTEREST!

CONGRESSIONAL INTEREST!

The camera was where I had left it.

We took the bus back to the city with the paralegal, Mrs. Patel. Caroline asked why her lawyer hadn’t been there for the hearing. “Because it takes up too much time,” Mrs. Patel said. “He can’t wait till two in the afternoon.”

Caroline closed her eyes, exhausted.

Last year, about fifty thousand people applied for asylum here. Of successful asylum applicants, thirty-two per cent were Chinese. Less than five per cent came from central Africa. In all, 21,113 applicants were given asylum: 11,244 by asylum officers like Novick and 9,869 by immigration judges.

The current political climate in the country is not favorable for asylum seekers. The number of people granted asylum has been decreasing—last year saw almost a thousand fewer successful applications than the previous year. Although there are no statistics on the number of applications that are fraudulent, immigration attorneys have a sense of the prevalence of such fraud, and the reasons that petitioners perpetrate it. Jason Dzubow is a lawyer who specializes in asylum cases in Washington, D.C., and runs a blog called The Asylumist. “Large parts of their stories are true, and then some people augment cases with things that are not true,” he says. Dzubow represents a number of university-educated Ethiopians who were arrested by the dictatorship in their home country, as a significant percentage of their classmates had been. If they go to the asylum coaches, or “case builders,” in the immigrant community, they will likely be urged to embellish their stories with tales of torture and beatings, because it is thought that being arrested alone will not make a strong enough case for asylum.

The majority of asylum seekers in America, immigration experts have told me, really would be at serious risk if they were returned to their countries. As for Caroline, there is no doubt that her family was brutally assaulted because of her parents’ political affiliations. She does indeed have a “well-founded fear of persecution” if she returns. But she felt that she had to augment the story with a rape because the immigration system can better comprehend such a story; Novick kept asking her for more details of the rape because a rape story was what was expected from a female petitioner from her country. The system demanded a certain kind of narrative if she was to be allowed to stay here, and she furnished it. She had read the expected symptoms of persecution, and repeated them upon command.

A couple of weeks later, Caroline was told to return to the asylum office, to hear the decision on her case. She asked Marie and me to go with her. Which way would her life go? Africa or America? Novick had decided.

This time, there was only one other applicant in the office, a woman in a shalwar kameez. “You have been approved,” the clerk told Caroline, handing her a letter. “Congratulations.”

But, the clerk warned her, the approval was conditional on a name check. The agency had to make sure that hers was the name on the application. Luckily, the name on the application was the one she was born with, and not any of those which she picked up later.

Caroline was crying, waving her hands in front of her face to cool it.

Downstairs, we read the letter. It was a sunny day, and Caroline jumped up and down, clutching my arm and crying, “I am legal! I can be Caroline!”

She noticed that we were standing in a huge parking lot. “There are a lot of cars in this country.”

A few months later, Caroline moved to a town in the Midwest, because she had a friend who had an apartment there, and she could live cheaply until she found a job. She now works for a company where her French-language skills come in handy. She is married to a white American man. She owns a car, and goes to church every Sunday. In her new life, she pays her taxes and has never taken a dime from the government. To many, she is a model American.

I keep thinking of the day Caroline moved from shadow to light. After she got the news that she’d been granted asylum, we celebrated at an anonymous-looking bar in an anonymous-looking office building near the asylum office. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and we ordered a bottle of champagne. When the tab came, Caroline, for the first time since I’d known her, got it. She gave the waitress a credit card. The waitress came back and said, “It’s not approved.” I offered mine, but Caroline dug into her purse and brought out cash.

The champagne flowed fast. When we were nearly at the end of the bottle, Marie told us that in France it’s said that “whoever drinks the last drop will get married this year.”

I took the bottle and shook the last drop into Caroline’s glass. “Where do you see yourself in ten years?” I asked her.

“I want to be une femme accomplie,” Caroline said. An accomplished woman. “I can study. I can be an actress. I can go under my own name. Cecile?” She looked around the empty bar, feigning puzzlement. “Who is Cecile?”